When the Tequila Comes Out, the Stories Do Too

There is a rule in Jalisco that nobody wrote down, because nobody needed to. First comes the meal. Then comes the bottle. And once the bottle comes out, so do the stories.

I learned this on my first trip, as a guest at a table full of people who made tequila for a living, whose parents did, and whose grandparents did. The food was extraordinary. But somewhere between the main course and the coffee, a bottle appeared, small glasses followed, and the whole table leaned back in their chairs like a curtain going up.

Somebody’s uncle started in on a land dispute that had been simmering since before anyone at the table was born. A cousin corrected his dates. An aunt corrected the cousin. Someone mentioned a wedding that nearly did not happen, and a name that was never spoken in a certain house again, and for a moment the whole table went quiet in the way that tells you the story is true.

I sat there with my glass and thought: I could never invent this.

Why distilling families make such good story people

Think about what it takes to make tequila the careful way. A blue agave plant needs years to mature, often seven or eight, sometimes longer, before a jimador cuts it from the field with a long-handled blade called a coa. Then comes the cooking, the fermenting, the distilling, the aging. You are making something today that you may not get to sell for a decade. That kind of patience makes a family think in generations.

And when you think in generations, everything becomes a saga. Who inherits the land. Who marries into the business. Who was left out of the will, and who knows why. Who loved the wrong person decades ago and never quite got over it. Add a little tequila to the conversation and the family archive opens right up.

I am not telling these stories as gossip. I am telling them as a lifelong fan of drama who found herself in the front row. What goes into my fiction is bent, blended and relocated, and nobody’s real name gets anywhere near the page. What I keep is the emotional truth: the pride, the grudges, the forgiveness that arrives decades too late, or sometimes just in time.

Which brings me to a confession. When I got home from that first trip, I could not stop writing. Notes on napkins, notes on receipts, notes in the margins of a paperback I was supposed to be reading. The ideas multiplied until I had thirteen stories sketched out, and they are all waiting in my notebooks now. I am working through them one by one.

So the next time someone tells you tequila is just for parties, tell them: no. It is for confessions.

Salud,

Maya